The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  ‘Fanfaniello, Chief Sorcerer, at your service, O King of Kings!’

  The Grand Vizier fluttered up, and flutingly explained:

  ‘The King desires to see the Queen of Sheba’s legs …’

  Lucia swallowed and fluttered fingers in pretend shock; Talia was laughing outright; Fantina’s eyes shone with anticipation; the widows and matrons around Maria Filippa were raucous, near weeping at the very idea. Imma bit her lip, but she too was laughing, quietly. In the Commissioner’s party, only the fans moved.

  Fanfaniello sang of the river the King would divert into the hall of state where the Queen of Sheba would be received. He jounced his thighs to conjure a flowing stream, and then, splashing himself vigorously with the invisible element, careered around the small stage, tracing the course of the current, darting his hands like shoals of fishes, shaking the water from his limbs, until everyone could see a river flowing on the stage, the bare boards teeming with fish. Then, dropping to a rumble, he commanded the river:

  ‘Be still, pure element, turn to crystal clear!’

  His arms upraised magus-like, he stepped forward tiptoe to test the ice he’d magicked on the surface of his unseen river; forward he moved, gingerly, then turned, with a grin and a thumb, to inform his audience that all was well, it held. To Solomon, he declared:

  ‘The river is glass, my liege –

  We shall see all we want to see and more –’

  Franco, accompanying the clown’s pantaloon routine with penny whistling and drumrolls gave the band the signal to start into the most lovesome, longing, blue-purple lyric aria he’d ever written in F sharp major, in honour of the Queen of Sheba’s beautiful blackness and her legs and her surrender; she rose from her throne at the side and came towards the King, lifting her skirts to walk across the fantasy path of mirror she thought was a stream that everyone else could see too. She came towards him, giving voice to the first notes of Franco’s setting for two voices of the Solomonic epithalamium,

  ‘Come, my love, my fair one, come away –’

  when the Commissioner stood up. With him, the Mayor – promptly – then his wife, then the Marshal of Police, and with them, but more slowly, the Bishop. (He would have liked to see the Queen of Sheba’s legs, or so it was said, afterwards.) The children on stage began to whimper as the Sindaco laid a hand on the nearest musician, not Franco, as it turned out, but the mandolinist, a shoemaker who’d played in the municipal band since 1911. He snatched the instrument from the old man and seemed about to break it over his head when the player fell on him and by fastening him in an imploring hug prevented him from working his worst.

  ‘Hooligans! Foreign trash! Traitors!’ cried the Commissioner. ‘Where are the battles? The sacrifices for the Fatherland? Where are our squads of braves? Our heroes laying down their lives for the empire?’

  The Mayor was not to be outdone in the Provincial Commissioner’s presence. ‘Where are the pilots who risk their all?’ he echoed. ‘The heroes of the stratosphere? The deliverers of barbarians from their slavery? In all this levity, this rebellious trash, where is the manliness of Italy?’ The Mayor’s wife, close beside him, nodding like a clockwork toy whose spring has gone, squealed a punctuation of laments to accompany her husband’s curses. ‘I’m still shaking, it’s so shocking, so dirty! What slanders, what immodesty! Oh, a woman like that! How could an Italian do it? What dishonour! And in Riba! Who would have thought it? In Naples, maybe in the slums over there. But here? Oh no, no, no, no, no!’ She was about to cry.

  By the side of the Mayor, the District Superintendent of Music and the Head of the Music School – Franco had asked him for teaching work – appeared and stabbed a finger at Franco. Franco was almost alone, now, among discarded costumes and abandoned music sheets; the other musicians, fearing the mandolinist’s fate, had scattered with the children’s chorus and the principals. Only Fanfaniello, retreating, cursed audibly the ruin of the evening. The Superintendent, aiming his accusing finger at Franco, announced, ‘We will expel him, Your Excellency, from the Fascist Union. American trash, that’s what he writes, that’s what he polluted our ears with today. I am ashamed, ashamed on account of the Music of Italy and our glorious Leader.’ With that, he clapped his hands over his ears, and made as if he were scrubbing them. ‘Music? Call this music? Nothing but asthmatic rhythms and deafening noise.’

  The Mayor elaborated, ‘Our Abyssinians are not Negroes, anyway, not like Americans. Our Negroes are different. Where are the fruits of Fascism in all this mockery?’ He snatched a score from Franco’s grip, and crumpled it, but held on to it, shaking it, ‘We will be looking into this, this insult to the patria!’ He kept his eyes on the Commissioner during this display of eagerness.

  Franco held his trombone across his chest, as the company around him scuttled off; he would have laughed, except that no sound came out of his throat. He was too choked, a thin sanies rose in his mouth, foul and burning. The loudspeaker started making an announcement again, about the raffle; someone was saving the situation, or trying to, pattering out the time of the draw and the sales of pottery from the hill towns and the gymnastics display in the sports stadium. Then the ice cream vendor put in an advertisement too for a new flavour, nespola with a dash of marsala.

  Franco tried to speak up. ‘Music isn’t only romantic. It doesn’t have to be Puccini to be Italian.’ No one was listening.

  He turned and went to the cordoned area, where Fanfaniello was rubbing off his make-up. When he saw Franco, he rolled his eyes, and spat. ‘That’s it, for you,’ he said. ‘Until you’ve proved you’re a good boy. If you can. And that’ll take so much bum-licking and brown-nosing you’ll burst with the shit you have to eat before they decide you’re on the level.’

  Lucia was crying. Talia in exasperation had abandoned her by the wall of the basilica, where she slumped; when Fantina approached, she refused to respond to her attempts to stop her rocking against the stone.

  ‘Now he’ll never be seen with me again, never, never,’ she wailed.

  ‘Of course he will,’ Fantina said, uncertainly.

  ‘No he won’t. Didn’t you see?’ She uncovered her brimming eyes for a moment and squalled in Fantina’s face, ‘He just vanished, didn’t he, the moment he heard the Commissioner. Didn’t you see that?’

  Maria Filippa, on the other side of the piazza, holding her chair, adrift in the shifting, gesturing crowd, beckoned to her two youngest. Then Franco joined them, and Lucia, seeing him, turned her face to the wall again in a new access of grief. Fantina tugged at her. Her mother approached them. She spoke to Lucia, in the voice which had soothed Imma like almond milk on a hot day, when she had lain burning ill in bed. She told Lucia that it was time to come home.

  Lucia got to her feet, she began trudging alongside. When she met Franco waiting, her eyes snapped at him. ‘You’ve spoiled everything, everything,’ she cried. He was still holding his trombone across his body.

  ‘Lucia,’ he said, ‘it’s their fault. Not mine. My ideas are different, that’s all. They’re just fools, and they can’t see what’s funny, they want marches and hymns …’ He broke off and put up a hand to cover his face.

  ‘It wasn’t funny,’ she was hissing at him. ‘It was hateful rubbish. I’m not a monster. Mamma’s not a monster. Why do you have to go and make songs that say such things?’

  Franco tried to shrug, and began, it was a joke, you know we all think the world of women. That’s not what they minded …’ But he broke off, and Fantina, who had never seen her father cry, and had never known the company of arty man intimately enough to know that men could cry, was astonished to see that his lips were trembling.

  Maria Filippa’s eldest daughters made way for their mother to give Franco the protection of her presence at his side. Small, black, in her cloche hat and strap shoes with her best handbag over her arm, she fell in beside him, and took his elbow. Terror sat on her, a bat-winged harpy on her back, but she knew not to let her know she felt her grip, becaus
e when beasts know you’re scared, they worry at you, hot carrion breath all over you, jaws snapping close. So she conjured hard the icon over her bed, and began to pray, Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail, our life, our sweetness, our hope.

  The known terror was better than the unknown, she told herself, she could deal with disgrace and punishment, she could tame them more surely than the flapping Fate who had inflicted on her so many thefts.

  To thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we sigh, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

  We’ll keep ourselves to ourselves, she decided. Deeper seclusion is the only answer.

  Turn then, O thou our advocate, thy merciful eyes upon us, and when our exile is over show us Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb.

  If we hide and do nothing, they cannot come after us, with accusations.

  O merciful.

  Franco will have to go back to his handkerchief music, I will give him – she thought of the stash of dollars she still had left, down to $ 150 now – $20, that should be enough, enough for that Chief Superintendent.

  O sweet.

  She sighed.

  O kind Mary.

  ‘Go after her,’ she told Fantina quietly, as Lucia took off ahead, pulling the ribbon from her hair, and flailing a way through the dispersing audience. Maria Filippa and Franco moved forward, and a wave broke around them, giving them room. The gap and the silence weren’t hostile, but scared rather. Perhaps I’d better make it $25, she thought, judging the intensity of the muteness around them.

  Fantina ran ahead, and caught up with her sister, who’d flung herself down in a doorway, sobbing. She bent to her, timidly. ‘Please don’t take on so,’ she pleaded. She was overwhelmed by a smell of piss, cat’s piss only, she realised with relief, coming from the threshold where Lucia was prostrate. She was terribly ashamed, she didn’t want the passersby to see Lucia like this – besides, he’d get to hear of if, what could be worse? ‘Not here, please.’

  She put out a hand to pull Lucia’s clothes straight, but her sister hissed at her, ‘Leave me alone. I want to die. There’s no point in trying, no point in anything at all. What’s the use of getting all dressed up and then …? I’m never going to get away … away from this! This little life! This nothing!’

  Fantina flashed a hand through her sister’s refusing gestures and managed to touch her. Her touch stilled Lucia’s bucking and writhing, and she dropped her warding hands and looked up at Fantina with eyes dirty from crying and said, ‘I’m going to end up like one of those crows, all in black and all alone, keeping house for someone and grateful for a bowl of lentils they shove at me.’

  Fantina helped her to her feet, ‘I’ll stay with you. We’ll be together.’

  Lucia held her sister’s hand so tight her knuckles locked.

  Her irises had vanished into her pupils so that she fixed a look on Fantina from two blind bolts pinned into her frantic head. ‘You’re not enough,’ she said.

  And you made a vow that instant, that you would never ever love any man with the wholeheartedness which Lucia wanted of love. You thought of Solomon with his hand on his heart, jerking himself up to puff out his promises, and you saw that he did not move you. You determined that he never would. You put your hand into Lucia’s gentler clasp now and began walking her home. She gave a little sob now and then, and you turned Guido Salvatore’s conceited and stupid face around in your mind and you said to yourself, He’s not worth it. No man is worth this torrent, this hunger. You wanted to shield Lucia with your coolness, strip it off like a coat and arrange it around her shoulders. But indifference isn’t something that one can make a gift of to loved ones who haven’t got it, not like generosity or compassion or tenderness or laughter or the other contagious feelings that can make things feel better, if only for a time. Indifference isn’t apt for exchange; it won’t pass from hand to hand. It’s impossible to break a bit off one’s own big share of indifference and hand it over with a smile to comfort the lovesick, saying, ‘Here, take it, I could do with less; in fact, if anything, I’d like to know what it’s like to feel so strongly. I’d like to care a bit more myself.’

  ‘I was the fourth daughter,’ you were saying, ‘and I think I saw so much trouble caused by men in my sisters’ lives that I made myself numb on purpose. When I saw Imma nearly die like that, when I saw Lucia in that kind of state, I made up my mind that I’d never fall for anyone, never, ever.’

  For you too, though, a certain King Solomon had to come, so that you could make your escape from the south, as your mother wanted for you (though it was never spoken aloud, this deep wish of hers). You wanted to leave, you’ve told me many times, because you were freakish there, too tall, and one of the American girls, besides. Each of you four sisters had to greet the necessary enemy – the husband who was not altogether an enemy but an outsider – and agree to be leashed and take the road to the country he had come from.

  You, Fantina, my mother, were specially fastidious though, particularly about rapture, and your Solomon was no young buck like Guido Salvatore, or Lucia’s Italian-American soldier husband with his Augustan nose and lustrous waves (my Californian Uncle Marty), or Talia’s naval beau from Oregon, another Italo-Americano who arrived in his ancestral lands with General Patton’s troops, or Imma’s (second) husband, a medic, from Chicago. Instead, your Solomon was plump and clumsy and mostly bald, my British father, an officer with the Eighth Army, and you knew when you saw him that he could not place you in jeopardy.

  Did you really manage a passionless life?

  When I was a child, your fidelity was rock-solid ground for me to stand on, I know. But now, I wonder, what would it have been like if you had chosen to marry the way I did, freely, without necessity or press of circumstance, and I had still been your daughter – and your witness. How different would it have been?

  I look into my past and hold on to knowing that once I really loved Nicholas’s father. A phrase came to me in a dream once, after we had split up. ‘You cleave to him,’ said the voice, and I saw that he and I, who had once cleaved together, were now cloven. The memory of us is a comfort, sometimes, though the loss since turns it cold.

  Sometimes, you’ll say to me, when we talk on the phone about being alone, you a widow, me divorced, that the self-sufficiency you acquired is a bit like the cladding on a boiler, to keep out a deeper chill, of rejection, of loss.

  I was nine when I first saw my father’s helpless dissolution in the cool clear liquid of your provident, assiduous, near selfless but always indifferent feeling for him; he would like to have stirred you, so that something at least smoked up the fluids of your emotions towards him, something maybe even turbid and murky, but at least volatile, not neutral, not placid, not like the inert argon which makes up a part of the air around us and has no properties at all, no combustiveness, no reactions, no motion. With you, the accumulation of your sisters’ and your aunts’ experience was mixed into a new solution of dispassion, a kind of argon of the psyche. You put up your guard until it became not just a second skin, but the epidermis and the dermis and the tissue and undertissues too.

  I’ve sometimes minded on my own account, it must be said.

  (I’m writing this to burrow under your defences, to bring you to memories and alliances with me through these confidences, to lay a claim on you.)

  I minded too for my raging father’s sake, who slashed and struck at the containing flask of your being, battling to get past the unrippled surface to the woman inside. But the surface went through and through, like the surface of a line it remained insensate and always in place whatever direction he took. It was partly an illusion, I know, there were ways past the glassiness, there must be, but you kept them secret.

  And you did this in horror of the old days, of the spilt feelings. ‘She used to lie on the bed and cry, for something, for someone. There was someone else, for instance, during the war, someone she wasn’t allowed to marry in the end, his mother wouldn’t let him, we
were outsiders, “the American girls”, and we hadn’t any money. How Lucia suffered! I told myself, and I meant it, you know, that I would never let myself suffer like she did.’

  I’m your loyal daughter in this, though I can see the cost, to you and to me, each of us sequestered, differently from the way you were on the Via Calefati in those days, but sequestered nevertheless, fathers lost, husbands lost. You never could be friends with a man; I can, I think. But for my part too, I only feel safe sleeping with one if I know I could never love him.

  PART THREE

  ANNA

  Des vies pures, en somme, des vies de filles pauvres et dédaigneuses, fringantes sur leurs talons tournés, et qui toisaient l’amour sans considération, d’un air de dire: ‘Pousse-toi un peu mon vieux, fais-toi petit … Avant toi, il y a la faim, la férocité et le besoin de rire …’

  COLETTE, LE TOUTOUNIER

  22

  PARNASSUS, 1985

  I BORROWED AUNTIE Lucia’s fuchsia Porsche – with the sun roof and the bumper sticker, ‘Don’t play leapfrog with a unicorn’ – and headed for Fun City’s downtown headquarters. I gave myself two hours to get there, in case I failed to negotiate the exits from the freeway correctly. My Uncle Marty had marked the route for me in lime-green highlighter and when I started off down the canyon and entered the banked traffic I was heady with the bravura of it all. It felt like the first swim of the summer holidays, when you’re taken aback that you can do it at all, that your body can become so streamlined and weightless and reliable. Nicholas complained as I set off; his face twisting in imitation of a younger child’s tears, and he stamped his foot to act cross.

  ‘But you’re off to Fun City itself,’ I confirmed. ‘With your Nonna and her sisters. I’m only going to their offices. There’ll be nothing there. Where you’re going there’ll be rockets and waterchutes and the gingerbread cottage – it gets baked freshly every two weeks, you can eat it just like Hansel. And there’s no witch.’ His face dropped at that. He’d probably have liked a witch he could shove in the flames by himself. Participation play, they’d call it. Or here, hands-on leisure aids.